When the LA thriller Drive becomes the success it seems destined to be, no one will be happier than me. Released next week, the film is a joy, a neon-tinted noir at once slickly adrenal and gloriously old-fangled. My admiration for its star Ryan Gosling is as mushy as anyone's, no mean feat now the entire world has a poster of him Blu-tacked to their ceiling. I've also spent the last 14 years boring anyone unlucky enough to stand nearby about the brilliance of its director Nicolas Winding Refn, and I'll tell you now that's been a lonely way to live.

So for me Gosling and Refn deserve every plaudit they're likely to get. But I hope the garlands get shared out just a little. Certainly, it's tempting to see Drive as a two-man show: Gosling is currently enjoying a serious professional moment while Refn has matured into a film-maker of real grace and precision.

Theirs is also quite the double act off screen – Gosling insisting Refn be hired in the first place, Refn talking of the production that followed as "all about me and Ryan". Press chores found the pair yucking it up together, while the future involves at least two further collaborations, a long-gestating remake of Logan's Run and the Bangkok-set Only God Forgives. It's a friendship for which beautiful may be too small a word.

And yet it's not all Drive has to offer. For one thing there's Carey Mulligan, with whom Gosling shares all manner of longing glances and half-concealed smiles. But as vital to the film as its winsome sweethearts are a notably more gnarled trio without whom it wouldn't have nearly the same darkly gleaming allure. For anyone with a yen for the grizzled character actor, Drive is nigh-on pornographic.

Yes, there in the role of menacing heavy is Ron Perlman, lately a leading man of sorts in Hellboy, but here returned to his natural home to the side of centre stage, that vast, improbable face looming out of the story like an Easter Island statue. Then comes Bryan Cranston, a fine actor only now getting his dues in his mid-50s after starring in the masterfully black TV show Breaking Bad, cannily employed here not just for his new marketability but a persuasive air of shit-magnet victimhood.

And last, most impressive of all, there's Albert Brooks, playing bluff and brutal and very much against comic type. It's a performance that reminds you of his bald-wigged turn as a white-collar convict in another wonderfully smart thriller from another decade, Steven Soderbergh's Out of Sight (1998) – but here his role is even more pivotal, the result being that he's the one of Drive's supporting actors I'd back to pick up a gong or two in awards season.

I hope so anyway. Gosling and Mulligan get the big displays of human tenderness, but the work being carried out around them is often awesomely delicate – the various tics and eccentricities of the three older men a delight to watch but the result never once tipping over into the cartoonish. The eye is drawn with a knowing bit of actorly business, but always allowed to return to the main attraction. Scenes aren't stolen as much as playfully shared out and passed around. It's a glorious reminder that no movie can live by beautiful film stars alone: go too far down that road and you end up with The Tourist.

Whereas Drive is doubly blessed, a showcase for a bona fide movie star that will also delight connoisseurs of the supporting cast – for me one of the true pleasures of film. In the performances of Perlman, Cranston and Brooks, I think you can trace a line of descent to the greats of the form: the eternally world-weary Yaphet Kotto, comic genius Thelma Ritter, Camberwell's insanely versatile Claude Rains, the tireless Brad Dourif and Paul Giamatti.

So in the next few months as Gosling and Refn soak up the adulation, I'd like to think the three old pros who do so much to bring their movie to life will also see a little love. I'll be even happier if Hossein Amini's script and James Sallis's original novel find at least a few supporters, but writers getting their due credit ... well, let's not ask for miracles.